Am I misinterpreting or missing something here? One of the earlier paragraphs of the article claims But according to Wikipedia Doesn't this contradict the article? Seems like a very obvious...
Am I misinterpreting or missing something here? One of the earlier paragraphs of the article claims
Nobody asked for or predicted the existence of neutrinos, but there they were in our early particle experiments.
The neutrino was postulated first by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to explain how beta decay could conserve energy, momentum, and angular momentum (spin).
In the 20 July 1956 issue of Science, Clyde Cowan, Frederick Reines, Francis B. "Kiko" Harrison, Herald W. Kruse, and Austin D. McGuire published confirmation that they had detected the neutrino
Doesn't this contradict the article? Seems like a very obvious mistake which is why I'm so puzzled. And the narrative in the article below that statement seems to also contradict it.
Correct, they were a prediction first, like most things in physics. Just another case of a science journalist not being familiar enough with the subject matter trying to spice up the article...
Correct, they were a prediction first, like most things in physics. Just another case of a science journalist not being familiar enough with the subject matter trying to spice up the article...
There's no contradiction, the author describes how beta decay was first observed, which was before anybody had "asked for or predicted the existence of neutrinos". Then: Then, Pauli theorizes the...
There's no contradiction, the author describes how beta decay was first observed, which was before anybody had "asked for or predicted the existence of neutrinos". Then:
There was just one small problem: Nothing added up. The electrons never came out of the nucleus with the same energy; it was a little different every time. Some physicists argued that our conceptions of the conservation of energy only held on average, but that didn’t feel so good to say out loud, so others argued that perhaps there was another, hidden particle participating in the transformations. Something, they argued, had to sap energy away from the electron in a random way to explain this.
Then, Pauli theorizes the neutrino:
Eventually, that little particle got a name, the neutrino, an Italian-ish word meaning “little neutral one.”
Then in 1956, we observe them:
But see them we did (although it took 25 years)
The sentence that's puzzling you is intended to communicate that nobody predicted neutrinos until after we had observed their effects and been very confused for a long time.
There's no contradiction; you just need to look back at even earlier experiments. Beta decay had been a known phenomenon since 1897 [1], and for over a decade people had been content with...
There's no contradiction; you just need to look back at even earlier experiments. Beta decay had been a known phenomenon since 1897 [1], and for over a decade people had been content with believing that, in addition to the nuclei, only one additional particle was needed to explain the decay process (an electron for charge conservation).
However, by 1914 James Chadwick had confirmed that the momentum of the outgoing electron obeyed a continuous distribution, which would violate energy conservation if there were only three particles involved in the decay. Two decades later Pauli hypothesized the neutrino, and some two decades after that the Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment verified their existence [2].
I'm... pretty sure that the Higgs boson and the Higgs field are different things. The Higgs field is what gives particles their mass. The Higgs boson it just a boson, it's not doing that.
The Higgs boson is an omnipresent quantum field that soaks all of space and time and forces all other particles to interact with it. This interaction creates a mass, with the strength of the interaction is connected to the amount of mass that a particular particle gets.
I'm... pretty sure that the Higgs boson and the Higgs field are different things. The Higgs field is what gives particles their mass. The Higgs boson it just a boson, it's not doing that.
To be clear, the Higgs field gives all of the elementary particles mass. My understanding is that it’s not the way to give particles mass, it’s just the one that happens to be the case for most of...
To be clear, the Higgs field gives all of the elementary particles mass. My understanding is that it’s not the way to give particles mass, it’s just the one that happens to be the case for most of the particles that do have it, and we don’t yet know how neutrinos get their mass.
The Higgs boson is a quantum particle in the Higgs field.
Am I misinterpreting or missing something here? One of the earlier paragraphs of the article claims
But according to Wikipedia
Doesn't this contradict the article? Seems like a very obvious mistake which is why I'm so puzzled. And the narrative in the article below that statement seems to also contradict it.
Correct, they were a prediction first, like most things in physics. Just another case of a science journalist not being familiar enough with the subject matter trying to spice up the article...
Perhaps they confused it for the discovery of the muon, which prompted I. I. Rabi's famous "Who ordered that?" retort?
From wiki:
Maybe author have in mind period between when we discovered issues with conserving energy in beta decay and postulation made by Pauli?
There's no contradiction, the author describes how beta decay was first observed, which was before anybody had "asked for or predicted the existence of neutrinos". Then:
Then, Pauli theorizes the neutrino:
Then in 1956, we observe them:
The sentence that's puzzling you is intended to communicate that nobody predicted neutrinos until after we had observed their effects and been very confused for a long time.
There's no contradiction; you just need to look back at even earlier experiments. Beta decay had been a known phenomenon since 1897 [1], and for over a decade people had been content with believing that, in addition to the nuclei, only one additional particle was needed to explain the decay process (an electron for charge conservation).
However, by 1914 James Chadwick had confirmed that the momentum of the outgoing electron obeyed a continuous distribution, which would violate energy conservation if there were only three particles involved in the decay. Two decades later Pauli hypothesized the neutrino, and some two decades after that the Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment verified their existence [2].
I'm... pretty sure that the Higgs boson and the Higgs field are different things. The Higgs field is what gives particles their mass. The Higgs boson it just a boson, it's not doing that.
To be clear, the Higgs field gives all of the elementary particles mass. My understanding is that it’s not the way to give particles mass, it’s just the one that happens to be the case for most of the particles that do have it, and we don’t yet know how neutrinos get their mass.
The Higgs boson is a quantum particle in the Higgs field.
Yeah, that last bit is the part that confused me. It says the Higgs boson is a quantum field, but that's conflating two different things.